How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off

Adam Grant, author of Originals, in The New York Times:

Child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses who change the world. We assume that they must lack the social and emotional skills to function in society. When you look at the evidence, though, this explanation doesn’t suffice: Less than a quarter of gifted children suffer from social and emotional problems. A vast majority are well adjusted — as winning at a cocktail party as in the spelling bee.

What holds them back is that they don’t learn to be original. They strive to earn the approval of their parents and the admiration of their teachers. But as they perform in Carnegie Hall and become chess champions, something unexpected happens: Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new.

New York Public Library Invites a Deep Digital Dive

The New York Times: 

NYPL Labs, started in 2011, has been known for experimental projects aimed at spurring users’ own tweaks and remixes. One scholar used its What’s on the Menu? project, which enlisted library users to transcribe its collection of 45,000 New York City restaurant menus, to create a new “data curation” of the collection. An engineer at Google has created a Google Cardboard application for its Stereogranimator, a program designed to mimic the proto-3-D effects of old-fashioned stereogram viewers.

Items from the digital collections have also found their way into projects like Urban Scratch-Off, a “map hack” that lets users scratch an aerial photograph of New York, lottery-ticket style, to reveal aerial shots of the city in 1924, and Mapping Cholera, which tracks an 1832 epidemic using geodata harvested from maps belonging to the library.

The new release will “reduce friction and make it even easier for people to get their hands on out-of-copyright material” owned by the library, Mr. Vershbow said.

Paola Antonelli: Rejection Is a Sign You’re Onto Something New

For more than 21 years, Paola Antonelli has been a curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Her career has been devoted to putting together provocative exhibits that spark new ways of thinking, and that often draws criticism. 

In this talk, Antonelli shares why failure and rejection are two feelings creative people should not only become familiar with, but should learn to embrace. “[Our work] can be weapons to really help people understand how to be better citizens,” she said. “But only if we will be allowed to do exhibitions that shock, disgust, and sometimes, even fail.”

David Bowie On Feeling Safe On What You Are Working On

“The other thing I would say is that if you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

David Bowie

Study Finds That Smart People Live Longer Than Not-Smart People

Fast Company reports: 

People are living longer than ever, says a report from the World Health Organization (WHO), but smart people live longer yet. People who are, shall we say, less smart die younger than more intelligent folks, and various studies around the world are attempting to find out why.

IQ affects how long you manage to stick around in this life, with a 15% increase in IQ giving a 21% better chance of not dying. These numbers come from a cohort study by researchers Lawrence Whalley and Ian Deary, using the Scottish Mental Surveys, a historic survey in which almost all 11-year olds in Scotland got the same IQ test on the same day in 1932. The new study found out which of these subjects were still alive, and at which age others had died.